116482 - new view-modes such as threaded, nested

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: Extension Ideas, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Adam Katz]

As compared to similar web forum-based services, bugzilla has only "flat mode."
 See a Slashdot article for reference (http://slashdot.org).  This is just like
threads in newsgroups.  This would eliminate the need to say "in response to
Joe's comment above..." as well as make content easier to read.  There could
also be an administrative thread, so that all "verified dup" and announcements,
etc can be set aside.  Bugzilla still has much to learn from Scoop
(http://scoop.kuro5hin.org) and SlashCode (http://slashcode.org) (for example,
moderation, bugzilla bug 42585).

Comment 1

[Adam Katz]

target->Future

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning all of my "future" targetted bugs to indicate that I'm not presently
working on them, and someone else could feel free to work on them.

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning all of my "future" targetted bugs to indicate that I'm not presently
working on them, and someone else could feel free to work on them. (sorry for
the spam if you got this twice, it didn't take right the first time)

Comment 4

[Michael Leupold]

I'd like to give this one a spin and already started toying around. So far the biggest challenges seem to lie in the frontend. I'd prefer every comment to have its own expandable reply textarea. Like that the user can easily figure out what he's currently replying to. Replying to multiple comments at once would be possible as well.

My only concern are non-js browsers. I see 3 possibilities:
1) Only show a single comment textarea for them (like it is now) => they can't use the feature.
2) Show the reply-to-comment boxes textareas for every comment => they can use the feature but long lists of bugs will only get longer.
3) Reload the page if the user hits a REPLY button => Inconvenient because it takes longer.

Comment 5

[[e-mail]]

Hi, 
I am interested in this feature and working on a patch. The basic idea is adding a new column "thread_id" into "longdescs" table. This new column is used to store the comment_id which is the "comment_id" for the parent of this comment, then the thread relationship will be rendered in template with indenting.
Is this the right direction?
Is this anything that would likely be picked up in a future release?

Thank you in advance for your feedback.

Comment 6

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: v1 Proposed patch.

Please review this patch to see if I am on the right track to fix this bug. If not, please provide some suggestion. Thanks a lot! :) 

This patch also need a db change:Add a new column named thread_id into longdescs table. The Id of the parent comment which current comment replies to  will be stored in this new column.

The sql statement is:
alter table longdescs add column thread_id mediumint(9) NULL Default NULL; 

Thanks a lot for reviewing this patch.

Comment 7

[Frédéric Buclin]

Please set the review flag to "?", else it won't appear in reviewers' radar.

Comment 8

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Comment on attachment 388916 [details] [diff] [review]
v1 Proposed patch. 

You know, I'm not really sure we want this functionality in Bugzilla at the moment. We might want it in the future, but I don't really see it being worth the complexity right now.

Perhaps instead it could be provided as an extension? See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:Writing_Extensions

Comment 9

[Greg Hendricks]

(In reply to comment #8)
> (From update of attachment 388916 [details] [diff] [review])
> You know, I'm not really sure we want this functionality in Bugzilla at the
> moment. We might want it in the future, but I don't really see it being worth
> the complexity right now.

I would vote that this be considered for 4.0. It is something our users have been requesting for ages.

Comment 10

[[e-mail]]

> Perhaps instead it could be provided as an extension? See
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:Writing_Extensions

To implement this feature as extension, I think we may overriding existing templates: template/en/default/bug/comments.html.tmpl used to display the comments, When we set the value: "When viewing a bug, show comments in this order" as "threaded view" in userprefs.cgi.

If so, we also need to consider another case: "comment" input textarea is in the file:template/en/default/bug/edit.html.tmpl as "[%# *** Comments Groups *** %]". We may also need/add "comment" input texteara in/into the "comment thread view" extension when user clicks the "Reply" link of a comment and it will be drawn/rendered below this comment then user can input comment expediently. Shall we move/separate this chunk codes of "comments groups" into a separate template file, and then process it in the file template/en/default/bug/edit.html.tmpl.then the "comment thread view" extension can override this  "comments groups" template.

That is just my thoughts, please correct me and give some more suggestion. :)

Thanks a lot!

Comment 11

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to comment #8)
> You know, I'm not really sure we want this functionality in Bugzilla at the
> moment. We might want it in the future, but I don't really see it being worth
> the complexity right now.

I agree. This would make it much more difficult to read new comments, because these new comments could be spread through the whole page. Personally, this is WONTFIX.

Comment 12

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Comment on attachment 388916 [details] [diff] [review]
v1 Proposed patch. 

Hey Xisun. I'm really really sorry that it took me so long to get to this review, and I hope that you can forgive me. 

I think I'm going to have to agree with LpSolit on this and say that this is something that would go as an extension.

I think you may be able to implement it as an extension totally by using JavaScript, since comments do say within them, usually, if they are a response to another comment. If you want some help on how to implement the extension, feel free to come into IRC and ask me about it.

Comment 13

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

By the way, I'm not saying that this will *never* make it into Bugzilla. I think that the best thing is to implement it as an extension for now, and then that will actually let us experiment more with it and see how it could be best integrated into Bugzilla (or if it should be integrated into Bugzilla at all).

Comment 15

[:glob ✱]

moving to 'extension ideas' as per comment 12.

bugzilla 5's comment tagging allows for pseudo threading of comments - you can tag related comments, and then show just those comments when viewing a bug.